{"title":"dead oceans","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"tomorrow-tomorrow-and-tomorrow","title":"Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe temptation to mythologize Bill Fay can be overwhelming; Fay was, for decades, as prolific as he was under-appreciated. Fay was, and still is, an artist disinterested in performance and promotion while remaining as dedicated a songwriter as ever, composing stacks upon stacks of stirring, abundant new music. Fay’s unsung-hero status has changed slowly, steadily, on the order of almost twenty-five years. With each new album comes new hosannas and evangelizers — Jeff Tweedy, Kevin Morby, Adam Granduciel and Julia Jacklin, to name just a few.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBut to focus on the mythology is to distract from what’s truly special: Bill Fay writes music with the honesty and clarity of a person with much to say but nothing to prove, and in doing so delivers songs of remarkable beauty and confidence. The Bill Fay Group, in particular, is Fay’s most significant collaborative work; he records as a member of a larger group here, and the result summons a grander sonic scale, an elegant counterweight to Fay’s instincts for the understated. Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow brings to bear the galactic qualities of early rock, the intricacy of jazz improv, and Fay’s earthy folk magic. For whatever might be going on amongst the instruments, Fay’s lyrics almost inevitably come back to nature, and to a matter-of-factness about love and loving that gives his work even more depth and power.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow has a patchy release history: recorded between 1978 and 1981, it was not released until 2005, when it appeared on CD with limited streaming and no vinyl companion. A 2006 reissue brought the album onto vinyl but with a truncated sequence and nine songs missing. Now, finally, Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow arrives in full worldwide. Available on streaming services worldwide and pressed to a double-album vinyl edition, it features the album’s original 20 songs and includes rare and previously unseen photographs from Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow’s original recording session.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe are fortunate to have a brief history of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, written by Gary Smith and Rauf Galip, missing Bill Stratton, and abbreviated from the forthcoming album notes:\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBoth Bill Stratton and Gary Smith liked Bill Fay’s albums at the time they were released. When his third album didn’t appear, Bill S. contacted Decca Records to find out why. They gave him a contact for Bill’s manager who said there wasn’t another contract in the offing, so put the two Bills in touch.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eForward to 1977, we’ve got The Acme Quartet, a trio, with Gary on guitar, Rauf on bass and Bill S. on drums (as Bill Fay said “Their sound was such though that they could have called themselves ‘The Acme Quintet’ or ‘Sextet’”). We’d been gigging for a while and got a performance at The Fulham Arts Centre in S.W. London. We asked Bill to come along and do a solo set. Nice grand piano for him and we all had a great evening. Bill asked us if we’d be interested in getting together, so we hired a rehearsal room above a pub in Wandsworth and it worked out well, socially and musically.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe met regularly in Gary’s flat in Tooting, in a tiny living room, to talk and work on the music. Bill had a lot of songs, and it was important for us, Gary, Bill S., and Rauf, to choose what we thought were the right songs. The Acme Quartet was an intense, uncompromising group, with a lot of improvising, beyond jazz and coming out of rock music. We initially wanted to make the music extremely powerful (there are elements of this in the song ‘Life’). Also, by this time Gary had more or less left rock music and hadn’t expected to work with someone like Bill and his music, he’d spent years doing that, but Bill was different. As has been said, we all served the music.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe chose five songs to record as finished pieces: Life, Spiritual Mansions, Cosmic Boxer, Strange Stairway, Isles of Sleep, all recorded in two studio sessions. We sent them out to try and get a record deal. There were few really independent labels back then and Punk was in the record labels’ ears. No deal.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAround this time Bill Stratton left the group. It was a difficult time, late night trains, not a lot to expect from beyond the music itself, hours in a day and we were financing everything, which wasn’t easy as we were all broke! Bazz Smith came in and generously gave his time, a brilliant drummer whom Gary and Rauf had both worked with (the same goes for Chris Merrick Hughes, John South, and Dave Bernez who gave their time and considerable skills). We knew we wanted to carry on to complete a full album, which we did.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnd now, Dead Oceans who have a lot of faith in Bill’s music wants to re- release the ‘Tomorrow’ album. A double vinyl package. Is there any more unreleased music for the fourth side? Of course. So, we’ve been opening old boxes, finding CDRs, cassettes, a musical archaeological dig. 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It’s not easy. In fact, it’s increasingly rare. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eA couple of years ago, A Place to Bury Strangers were in search of a new drummer. Lia Simone Braswell, an L.A. native, had recently moved to New York, and was playing drums in shows around Brooklyn “just to keep her chops up.” As it turned out, APTBS bassist Dion Lunadon caught one of those shows and, after seeing her play, was moved to ask her if she’d want to come to a band practice sometime.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“I told some of my friends about it before I met up with them,” Braswell says, of the rehearsal that would soon lead to her joining the band. “They told me, ‘You’re just gonna have to keep up as much as you possibly can.’”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“To be fair, she had also never seen us live,” Lunadon adds. “She didn’t necessarily know what she was getting into.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhat she was getting into: For well over a decade now, A Place to Bury Strangers—Lunadon, founding guitarist\/singer Oliver Ackermann, and, officially, Braswell—have become well known for their unwavering commitment to unpredictable, often bewildering live shows, and total, some might say dangerous volume. They don’t write setlists. They frequently write new songs mid-set. They deliberately provoke and sabotage sound people in a variety of cruel yet innovative ways. They can and will always surprise you. “When something goes wrong on-stage, a lot of bands will crumble under the pressure,” says Ackermann. “We like the idea of embracing the moment when things go wrong and turning it into the best thing about the show.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis April marks the release of Pinned, their fifth full-length and an album that finds them converting difficult moments into some of their most urgent work to date. It’s their first since the 2016 election, and their first since the 2014 closing of Death By Audio, the beloved Brooklyn DIY space where Ackerman lived, worked, and created with complete freedom. “After DBA closed, I moved to an apartment in Clinton Hill,” he says. “I couldn’t make too much noise, couldn’t disturb my neighbors. I would just sit there and write with a drum machine. It had to be about writing a good song and not about being super, sonically loud.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThere are searing meditations on truth and government-led conspiracies (“Execution”), as well as haunting, harmonized responses to the tensions of our current political climate (“There’s Only One of Us”). It all opens with “Never Coming Back,” a frightening crescendo of group vocals, vertiginous guitar work, and Lunadon’s unrelenting bass. “That song is a big concept,” Ackermann says. “You make these decisions in your life…you’re contemplating whether or not this will be the end. You think of your mortality, those moments you could die and what that means. You’re thinking about that edge of the end, deciding whether or not it’s over. 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I like that. I like a challenge. I like to be forced to do something that’s slightly hard, just to see if we can.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Just to see if we can” could be the unofficial motto of Bright Eyes, the band Oberst founded as a teenager and plays in with two of his oldest friends, multi-instrumentalists Mike Mogis and Nate Wolcott. “We’ve never made the same record twice,” the singer says. “I’m proud of that.” From warm folk-rock to austere electro, plaintive, earnest ballads to glacially cool guitar noise, Bright Eyes has tried on pretty much every sound that’s ever inspired them, just to see if they could. Along the way they’ve collaborated with many of their influences, heroes, and peers, from Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris to Jenny Lewis, Nick Zinner and Britt Daniel. And they’ve seen their songs covered by many more, including Lorde, The Killers, and Mac Miller.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFor a band that’s often been perceived as an outlier – the ingenious but quixotic group fronted by that wunderkind singer-songwriter with the floppy hair and bedroom eyes - the depth, breadth, and impact of the Bright Eyes canon is remarkable. And that’s what really strikes you when you sit down to fully take in the nine Bright Eyes albums that will be reissued, in chronological order, in groups of three, beginning this spring. Over the last two-plus decades, as Bright Eyes has released one after another time capsule LP’s –urgent dispatches from transcendent, fleeting eras of our collective lives – they’ve also simultaneously been assembling a robust, mature, narratively cohesive discography. “I’ve written a looooot of songs,” Oberst says, laughing. “And by no means are they all good, but the fact that we can cull through these records and find ones that I’m not ashamed to sing years later makes me feel pretty happy.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt’s the desire to celebrate that sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt was the band’s way of reframing, rediscovering, and renewing the past. It was also a hilarious amount of work. “I thought it was a cool concept,” Oberst says. “Then I realized its nine records, six songs a piece, so that’s like 54 different songs you have to record!” He laughs. But if there’s a mantra more central to the Bright Eyes ethos as trying something new just to see if you can get away with it, it’s signing up for way more than you can handle just to see if you can make it work. “We always bite off more than we can chew,” Oberst summarizes. “It keeps things interesting.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eWAVE 1: May 2022\u003cbr\u003eA Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 (1998)\u003cbr\u003eLetting Off The Happiness (1998)\u003cbr\u003eFevers and Mirrors (2000)\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“I wrote all these songs before I turned 20,” Oberst says. “And a lot of them are better than the recordings – the recordings were sometimes really bad – so it was cool to sing them in a way that doesn’t hurt my ears when I listen back.” This was the most explicitly retrospective and intimate part of the whole reissue project, as well as the most immediately gratifying. “You get a re-do,” Oberst says, smiling.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnd then there was the pleasure of digging back into Fevers and Mirrors, one of Bright Eyes most beloved and enduringly obsessed-about records. “There’s some percentage of kids every year that get to high school and an older sister or a friend or somebody hands them that record,” Oberst says. “I know that for a fact because I see the royalty statements. It’s not a ton of people but there are a few who keep buying it over and over again, and it’s over twenty years old! That’s really cool to me. 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Phoebe, I like your hair yellow like that. Is it Manic Panic?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: No.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt’s got a sort of grunge vibe. Did you know that in dream analysis the color yellow is symbolic of intellect, energy, agility, happiness, harmony, and wisdom?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: Of course.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo, first thing’s first: Better Oblivion Community Center. I heard you guys were visiting Forest Lawn Cemetery  - which we’ll talk about again in a minute - and you took a selfie to post on Instagram, up by where they have that statue of David there, it’s bigger than the actual statue of David in Florence, I think, and you guys noticed in the location tagging that there were a lot of geolocation options in other languages...I guess...Armenian? Mandarin? Korean?\u003cbr\u003eConor: Burmese.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYeah! Burmese. Right?And then you tagged your location but later on you typed those characters into Google Translate and it turned out not to be tagged from “Forest Lawn”. It actually translated as “Better Oblivion Community Center”. Is that right?\u003cbr\u003eConor: (laughs) No.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReally?! Cuz I heard that and I thought that was so cool! Where did the name come from then?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: Do people care where the name came from?\u003cbr\u003eConor: Nah.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlright. We can leave that in, I guess we answered it... So let’s get to when you two met. It was a show at the Bootleg in LA, and Conor you were playing a secret show and Phoebe, your friend at the venue got you to open for them. This was July 2016, so before Stranger In The Alps was out, and Conor, you were there early enough to watch her set. And afterwards you asked her to send you her record. You must’ve really been impressed with her set. \u003cbr\u003eConor: Yeah. It was a weird thrown together show. A lot of people played short sets, like Gillian Welch and Jim James. Kyle, who put on the show, said Phoebe was his favorite songwriter in LA, so I was excited to check it out. I was immediately struck by her voice. There are not a lot of people whose voice stops you in your tracks like that.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI bet you get people trying to send you their music all the time. Everywhere you go, right?\u003cbr\u003eConor: Kinda.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut you actually asked for hers.\u003cbr\u003eConor: I did.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd then you invited her to open for you on tour.\u003cbr\u003eConor: Yeah.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat was the Salutations tour?\u003cbr\u003eConor: Ruminations.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight yeah, Ruminations. And you guys would do “Lua” together on the road?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: Sometimes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo then you guys would guest at each others shows, right? And Conor, you were spending a lot of time in Los Angeles around this time. Cuz you’ve been in Omaha mostly the past few years but you have a spot in LA, on the West Side.\u003cbr\u003eConor: East side.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight, and so you guys would show up and guest at shows. And you’re on Phoebe’s song “Would You Rather”. So really early on you started collaborating on music, right? That was kind of an immediate spark, this instinct to perform and sing together. And your voices, they really compliment one another. There’s something really special about when you duet. Particularly when you sing in unison, it really works. Phoebe, you have a really sweet, crystal clear voice and Conor, yours is more world weary and raspy, so there’s something really striking about them together.\u003cbr\u003eConor: I guess that’s one way to look at it. I wouldn’t necessarily say Phoebe’s voice is crystal clear.  At least not in a Mickey Mouse way.   I think it’s textured in a very unique and interesting way. In that she can sing anything and there is a certain gravity to it that other voices don’t bring.\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: I do agree that Conor’s voice is pretty raspy. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight, yeah. That’s true, “gravity” is a perfect word for it. And you know, I say ‘in unison’, it’s from the Latin. It means, literally, ‘one sound’ but when you guys sing together it’s really not, it’s incredibly rich because you get both these different emotions from the exact same lyrics. The sort of clear eyed optimistic sound of Phoebe’s vocal and then the more seasoned sound of Conor’s.  \u003cbr\u003eConor: Sure.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first song you wrote together is the first song on the album, “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For” and at that time you weren’t really thinking it would be a whole album but you knew you wanted it to be its own thing, not a Phoebe Bridgers \u0026amp; Conor Oberst album of acoustic songs? \u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: Yeah, we didn’t know if it would be a single or an EP or what, but we knew we wanted to try writing together and for it to have its own identity with a band name.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen you’re out touring,  you’re on the bus and you’re playing songs to pass the time, right? There’s a photo of you in the album artwork, Phoebe you have a guitar on your lap and you’re both surrounded by this incredible mess of the tour bus. A lot of milk cartons, snack wrappers and piles of dirty clothes and just general mess. Is channeling the chaos of a bus tour into the structure of a song something you usually do?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: I’m actually holding an acoustic bass in that photo.\u003cbr\u003eConor: We wrote in LA, mostly.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAh, okay. But you wrote them together. It’s not like Conor would have a song and send it to you, or you would have a song and he would just add bits to it. These songs you guys sat down and wrote together. In the same room?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: Yeah.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou guys obviously compliment each other vocally, we talked about that, but you also feel an affinity with one another in that you admire each other’s songwriting. And you both generally write alone, right? It’s not your usual thing to write a song with someone else.\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: I write with my friends a lot.\u003cbr\u003eConor: I don’t have any friends.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDid you guys ever sit down and talk about themes or how you wanted the album to sound? Did you discuss what kind of songs they’d be or did you just sit down and start writing to see what would happen?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: We knew we wanted to play with a band, so we kept that in mind while we were writing stuff.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDid you see that Nick Cave documentary? Where he’s in the studio writing with Warren Ellis and he says if they’re not having terrible ideas that they have to walk back they know they’re not getting anywhere? They call it the “Walk Of Shame”, when you have to walk back an idea that didn’t work.  Have you done the “Walk Of Shame”?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe \u0026amp; Conor (in unison): Yeah.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of my favorites is “Forest Lawn”. People outside of Los Angeles might not know that it’s the largest cemetery in LA. And it’s very beautiful, I should add.  There’s something so sweet about the song but it’s essentially about losing someone and wanting to get them back. “Dig you out”, you say. It’s not really about exhuming someone. Or maybe it is? Maybe it’s the sweetest song about exhuming a corpse ever written?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: It’s not not about exhuming someone. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMusic critics have spilled a lot of ink over your guys work. I’m not even gonna try. But can you describe each other’s song writing in three words?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: Cis white male.\u003cbr\u003eConor: (laughs)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think if I heard you two had made an album I might’ve expected something a bit different. Because it sounds so much like a band, it might not be exactly what people would guess it’s gonna sound like. It’s got a great synergy.  And you put together an awesome group of musicians for it. You guys have got Nick Zinner from Yeah Yeah Yeahs - he plays guitar on “Dylan Thomas” and “Dominoes”. And you’ve got Carla Azar from Autolux, she’s also Jack White’s drummer, she’s on about half the record. Conor, you’ve played with her before, haven’t you? She played on the last Bright Eyes’ album The People’s Key.\u003cbr\u003eConor: Yes. She’s great.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd Nick Zinner is someone you’ve been friends with for years. He played a lot on  your record Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and toured as part of Bright Eyes back in 2006\/ 2007? \u003cbr\u003eConor: 2004\/2005.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd you’ve got the rhythm section from Dawes, Wylie Gelber and Griffin Goldsmith, who you’ve also toured with. They were your backing band on the Upside Down Mountain tour. \u003cbr\u003eConor: Yeah.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd some other talented friends, songwriter Christian Lee Hutson on guitar, and Anna Butterss on bass. They both played bass in Phoebe’s touring band at different times, right? How would you compare them as players? \u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: They’re both good, a lot different stylistically. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd you produced it yourselves with Andy LeMaster.  Andy’s someone you’ve worked with for almost your whole career, Conor. So he’s someone you trust? \u003cbr\u003eConor: Absolutely. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere’s so many great lines on this album. A lot to unpack. You can really lose yourself in it. Do you have a favorite lyric? Or maybe a favorite lyric that the other one came up with?\u003cbr\u003eConor: We pretty much wrote everything together, so it’s hard to remember who wrote what.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou’re going to tour this record in March and April. You’re putting a band together for it now, right?\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: Yeah.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI wanted to talk about “Dylan Thomas” cuz that’s the first single, right? It’s the first single and the last song you wrote for the album. There’s a lot of death and ghosts on the album, and mentions of illness and feeling unwell and being anxious - and those are things you’ve both written about a lot - which is partly why this collaboration works so well.  Dylan Thomas, we all know, is the esteemed Welsh poet who died in 1953 at the age of 39. He’s mentioned for ‘dying on the barroom floor’ and you know, he was definitely a big drinker. He was drinking at the White Horse in the West Village every night he was in New York before he died. And he fell into a coma at the Chelsea Hotel and died soon after at Saint Vincent’s on 8th Avenue. Did you know that he actually died of emphysema, pneumonia and bronchitis? And that in November 1953, the month he died, over 200 people died in New York City from air pollution? He probably died from smog.\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: Huh.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI should ask why you released this as a surprise.\u003cbr\u003ePhoebe: We love surprises.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI guess my last question is do you think this is a one off or do you think there will be more Better Oblivion Community Center albums to follow?\u003cbr\u003eConor: Your guess is as good as ours.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGuys, thanks for your time. Are you gonna eat the rest of that donut?\u003cbr\u003eConor: It's all yours, man.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e- Chester Middlesworth (PHD)\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Better Oblivion Community Center","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":44536155504803,"sku":"DOC188cd","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP Black Vinyl","offer_id":44536155537571,"sku":"DOC188lp","price":23.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP Translucent Orange Vinyl","offer_id":44536155570339,"sku":"DOC188lp-C1","price":25.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"Bundle","offer_id":44536155603107,"sku":"DOC188xbnd01","price":22.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0651\/6703\/2483\/files\/doc188_ssthumb.jpg?v=1776690499"},{"product_id":"better-oblivion-5yr-anniversary","title":"Better Oblivion Community Center  5 Year Anniversary","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBetter Oblivion Community Center is a band comprising the formidable talents of Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst, two of the most lauded American songwriters of the past several years. 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Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. \/ Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here?\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAfter the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMaybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. 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They reanimate the charming hallmarks of sunshine-rock past without being sepia-toned retro or bubblegum-cloying. There is an innate playfulness and honesty to the music they make. It's a dynamic that has made public champions of keen-eared musicians like John Darnielle (Mountain Goats) and Craig Finn (The Hold Steady). It was Darnielle who claimed The Donkeys were benevolent keepers of what he called  \"The Antidote\" to an unnamed sickness plaguing indie rock. We liked that sentiment a great deal.  Born With Stripes is an altogether less twangy affair than the band's 2008 Dead Oceans debut, Living On The Other Side. The nods to Grateful Dead and Buffalo Springfield are better balanced with echoes of other Cali arists, notably Pavement and Beck. The country-rock flairs are often overtaken by powerpop hooks. \"Ceiling Tan,\" feels like a lost weekend in Tijuana with Mutations and Crooked Rain,  and may well be the band's mission statement. \"I Like The Way You Walk\" also cops a 90s' alt-rock lick, but ditches any esoterica for earnest yearnings and sweet nothings. 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It’s an expansive, diaristic, frequently sardonic record that deals with the mess and the catharsis of entering your 20s and finding peace while being alone. \"I think this record is proof that I can be emotionally stable, even if right now I feel a little bit up and down,” says Fenne. “There's the ability to find clarity in that. It's sobering, weirdly.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFenne was born in London and moved to Dorset as a toddler, where she grew up in the picturesque English countryside. She was a \"free range kid,” as she calls it, after her parents took her out of school for a period at the age of seven. Over the following year, they taught her while the family travelled Europe in a live-in bus. Even after she returned to traditional school at 9, her home education never ended, extending to music. Her mother gifted Fenne with her old record collection, through which she discovered her love for T-Rex and the Velvet Underground and Nico. Soon after she fell for the strange genius of PJ Harvey and came to worship Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and the richly crafted worlds of Feist, which inspired Fenne to pick up a guitar.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOn Hold, a tender collection of expressive, open-hearted songs, was Fenne’s first foray into songwriting, written during her teenage years. Writing her own songs was initially a \"therapy exercise\" for Fenne, who is normally reserved when it comes to talking about her feelings. The album, self-released in 2018, organically found a large audience online, which grew after she opened for Lucy Dacus and Andy Shauf’s North American tours last spring. Surrounding its release, The Line of Best Fit deemed Fenne \"a new and extraordinary voice capable of wringing profound and resonant moments out of loss.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhere On Hold grappled with love and relationships, BREACH digs deeper into Fenne herself. \"I tried to write about my inner life, as opposed to how people affect my life as a third party,\" she explains. Written after a disjointed experience of touring Europe, and then spending a month alone in Berlin, the album deals largely with \"feeling lonely. And trying to work out the difference between being alone and being lonely.\" Although its subject matter is solitude, it sounds bigger and more intricate than anything Fenne previously released. She recorded with producer Brian Deck at Chicago’s Narwhal Studios, with further work at Electrical Audio.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLead single \"Alapathy\" is the first taste of a newly upbeat and urgent streak to Fenne's songwriting. Its insistent percussion mimics the anxious racing thoughts that Fenne deals with as an overthinker and chronicles how she “started smoking weed to switch off [her] brain.” The title is a made-up word that merges \"apathy\" and \"allopathic\" (as in Westernized medicine). \"Western medicine generally treats the symptoms of an illness rather than the cause,\" explains Fenne. For Fenne, taking medication to improve her mental health didn’t solve her problems because she felt like she was only treating the effects of her discomfort, not the reason for it.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eElsewhere, there are brighter songs on the album. Fenne wrote hazed-out lo-fi rock song \"Solipsism\" after watching a documentary about the Stone Roses. She wanted to create \"something that sounded cheerful, about something really not cheerful.\" The song deals with the anxieties of a social media driven generation, “because everyone is sharing everything, and everyone's comparing their lives to other people's.\" She sighs her age (\"twentyyyyy... ohhh\") over the strident surge of guitar fuzz, as she sings about the pressure to have more fun in her 20s, and the solipsism that keeps her awake.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOn slowly unfurling “Berlin,” which she describes as her defining moment of the record, Fenne has a hushed-yet-powerful energy. It was written during her time alone in Berlin after her third reading of Patti Smith's Just Kids, and made a solo voyage to the popular nightclub Berghain. The experience was one of pushing her own boundaries, and the morning after, she woke up and wrote “Berlin,” a careful, beautiful declaration celebrating being comfortable being alone.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe songs that make up BREACH layer Fenne's own experiences with what she's learned from others. Initially, \"Elliott\" was inspired by someone she met in Bristol who turned his back on the allure of being in a rock band to run a hardware shop. As the lyrics started to arrive, the song “became clearly about my dad’s childhood and solidified the record as something chronicling more than my own stories,” says Fenne. “Elliot,” with its gentle harmonies, is a peaceful moment that condenses many of the record's themes: family, the relationship between our child and adult selves, and the decision to follow an isolated, untrodden path.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt's that journey to find peace inside herself that underpins the whole of Fenne's second album. Its title, BREACH, occurred to Fenne after deep conversations with her mum about her birth, during which she was breech, or upside down in the womb. The slippery double-sidedness of the word – which, spelled with an \"A\", means to “break through” – drew her in. \"That feels like what I was doing in this record; I was breaking through a wall that I built for myself, keeping myself safe, and dealing with the downside of feeling lonely and alone. 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I like to be forced to do something that’s slightly hard, just to see if we can.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Just to see if we can” could be the unofficial motto of Bright Eyes, the band Oberst founded as a teenager and plays in with two of his oldest friends, multi-instrumentalists Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. “We’ve never made the same record twice,” the singer says. “I’m proud of that.” From warm folk-rock to austere electro, plaintive, earnest ballads to glacially cool guitar noise, Bright Eyes has tried on pretty much every sound that’s ever inspired them, just to see if they could. Along the way they’ve collaborated with many of their influences, heroes, and peers, from Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris to Jenny Lewis, Nick Zinner and Britt Daniel. And they’ve seen their songs covered by many more, including Lorde, The Killers, and Mac Miller.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFor a band that’s often been perceived as an outlier – the ingenious but quixotic group fronted by that wunderkind singer-songwriter with the floppy hair and bedroom eyes - the depth, breadth, and impact of the Bright Eyes canon is remarkable. And that’s what really strikes you when you sit down to fully take in the nine Bright Eyes albums that will be reissued, in chronological order, in groups of three, beginning this spring. Over the last two-plus decades, as Bright Eyes has released one after another time capsule LP’s –urgent dispatches from transcendent, fleeting eras of our collective lives – they’ve also simultaneously been assembling a robust, mature, narratively cohesive discography. “I’ve written a looooot of songs,” Oberst says, laughing. “And by no means are they all good, but the fact that we can cull through these records and find ones that I’m not ashamed to sing years later makes me feel pretty happy.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt’s the desire to celebrate that sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt was the band’s way of reframing, rediscovering, and renewing the past. It was also a hilarious amount of work. “I thought it was a cool concept,” Oberst says. “Then I realized its nine records, six songs a piece, so that’s like 54 different songs you have to record!” He laughs. But if there’s a mantra more central to the Bright Eyes ethos as trying something new just to see if you can get away with it, it’s signing up for way more than you can handle just to see if you can make it work. “We always bite off more than we can chew,” Oberst summarizes. “It keeps things interesting.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOne of the things that struck Oberst as he and the band went through twenty-plus years of music is that he may in fact have been writing the same song this whole time. Not sonically, of course, but conceptually. This last wave contains, in Noise Floor, early Bright Eyes songs so raw Oberst never even released them back in the day, as well as, in Cassadaga and The People’s Key, the band’s most polished and sophisticated albums. When Bright Eyes toured Cassadega they performed an epic 7 sold-out nights at NYC’s Town Hall. What’s more grown-up rock-star than that? And yet …“Thematically those early songs are not that different than the songs I make now,” Oberst says, shaking his head. “There’s something affirming and disheartening about it. It’s like, have I really changed or grown? 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Life, love, new beginnings, death— “it’s laughable, honestly, the amount of ‘major life events’ we could chalk up if we were keeping score,” Houck says. “A lot can happen in five years.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOn C’est La Vie, Houck’s first album of new Phosphorescent material since 2013’s gorgeous career defining and critically acclaimed Muchacho, he takes stock of these changes through the luminous, star-kissed sounds he has spent a career refining. By now, Houck has mastered the contours of this place, as intimate as it is grand, somewhere between dreamed and real, where the great lyrical songwriters meet experimental pioneers and somehow distill into the same person. It is Houck’s own personal musical cosmos, a mixture of the earthy and the wondrous, the troubled and the serene, and by now he commands it with depth and precision. When you ask Houck about the cumulative effect of all this life happening in such a short time, he turns philosophical: ”These significant moments in life can really make you feel your insignificance,” he says. \"It's a paradox I guess, that these wildly profound events simultaneously highlight that maybe none of this matters at all...\" On this album, Houck reckons with that void — the vanishing point where our individual significance melts into the stars — and sums it up thusly: C'est La Vie.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the album’s opening moments, Houck sings of this newfound landscape. Of the discovery of new paradigms and the disposal of those no longer useful. After the wordless, haunting Houck-choir opener of “Black Moon \/ Silver Waves”, he pointedly begins the title track “C’est La Vie No. 2” with the albums first lyrics: “I wrote all night \/ Like the fire of my words could burn a hole up to heaven \/ I don’t write all night burnin’ holes up to heaven no more.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\"I was always pursuing this thing of Phosphorescent and becoming the artist that I wanted to become, that sometimes I didn’t even have a second for reflection,” Houck says of the hectic years spent creating, releasing and touring Muchacho. \"I was plowing forward—just do, do, do and all else was secondary.” Not that this album exhibits any sense of settling down into complacency. On the contrary, this collection contains some of Houck’s most devastating works to date, but there’s a refreshing measured confidence that radiates throughout C’est La Vie.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSonically, C’est La Vie is his masterwork: Every sound, including his famously frayed, bemused voice, rings out as inviting and clear as a koi pond. Working in a studio he built from scratch (which certainly came with its own set of challenges) Houck once again set off to produce his own record, calling in musicians from his crack live band as well as friends new and old, and enlisting veteran Vance Powell to help mix the completed project. The writing process was more intuitive, less cerebral and with fewer revisions than anything he'd written before. It was a scary, liberating new approach, like painting with his eyes closed. \"I let go of a lot of my writer-poet tricks, and let the lyrics be what they wanted to be,” he says. These lyrics marvel at life’s ability to uproot and re-deposit you into alien, revelatory landscapes: “If you’d have seen me last year, I’d have said, ‘I can’t even see you there from here.’” he sings, wryly, on “There From Here.” This has been one of Phosphorescent’s constant themes—the ever-present possibility for transformation.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBut for the first time, Houck seems to be laying down some burdens. “These rocks, they are heavy\/I’ve been carrying them around all my days,” he sighs on the album’s closing ballad “These Rocks.” On that same song he also muses, with disarming forthrightness, about drinking: “I stayed drunk for a decade\/I’ve been thinking of putting that stuff away.” The lyric makes Houck somewhat uncomfortable, both in its direct simplicity and its capacity to distract listeners into thinking he’d written a stereotypical “battle with the bottle” song. “I'm aware of how that verse resonates, but for me those lines take a backseat to the main driver of that song,” he says. “I originally assumed I'd rewrite and re-sing that lyric,” he says. \"But the bones of that song were recorded live and it was the first time I ever played it. It was the first time the band ever heard it and I think it captured something perfect. And it was, y'know, true.\" So I had to ask myself, again, ‘Well, what is the point of what I’m doing here? I could re-record it but why not just let it be?” To hear Houck, he confronts this moment of mystery every time he records. “Oh yeah, this process is positively filled with moments where you go ‘What exactly the hell is it that I'm doing here?’” Houck laughs. “And the answer always comes back a resounding, ‘I don’t know.’”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAin't that just how it goes, C’est La Vie\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Phosphorescent","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":44536161173667,"sku":"DOC113cd","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP Clear Vinyl","offer_id":44536161206435,"sku":"DOC113lp-C1","price":25.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Cassette","offer_id":44536161239203,"sku":"DOC113cass","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0651\/6703\/2483\/files\/doc113_ssthumb.jpg?v=1776690367"},{"product_id":"christmas-time-is-here-khruangbin","title":"Christmas Time Is Here","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e*North \u0026amp; South America Edition, ships by Nov 20*\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAt the close of a marathon year supporting their breakthrough album, Con Todo El Mundo, Khruangbin return with an exciting addition – an update on Vince Guaraldi’s timeless “Christmas Time Is Here.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\"Growing up the three of us all had very different Christmases,” says bassist Laura Lee. “But we recently discovered we all had the exact same favorite Christmas song. When we realized it, we sat down to play it and it came together instantly. In 15 minutes we had this recorded. It was like the best Christmas present ever.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWith ambling sweetness and a fresh, beat-driven groove, Khruangbin have taken this oft-covered classic and made it wholly their own.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Khruangbin","offers":[{"title":"7\" green vinyl","offer_id":44536161304739,"sku":"DOC184lp","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0651\/6703\/2483\/files\/doc184-2020.cover.jpg?v=1776690367"},{"product_id":"city-music-kevin-morby","title":"City Music","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCity Music is an airplane descending over frozen lakes into Chicago. City Music is riding the Q Train out to Coney Island to smell the ocean and a morning in Philadelphia where great cranes reconfigure the buildings like an endless puzzle. City Music is a quiet afternoon moment on a bench in Baltimore, a highway in Seattle at night where the distant houses look like tiny flames and a bottle of red wine being drained on a bridge in Paris. City Music is a bus pulling into St. Louis at dawn where the arch looks like a metal rainbow reflecting the days early sunlight....\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e'City Music' is also the new album by Kevin Morby. Full of listless wanderlust, it’s a collection inspired by and devoted to the metropolitan experience across America and beyond by a songwriter cast from his own mould. As he puts it: “It is a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHis fourth album, 'City Music' works as a counterpart to Morby’s acclaimed 2016 release 'Singing Saw', an autobiographical set that reflected the solitude and landscape in which it was recorded. It was imagined as “an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless. They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnd now follows 'City Music', the yang to its yin, the heads to its tails. It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator’s brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image. “Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener,” explains Morby. “Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.” It finds Morby exploring similar themes of solitude, but this time framed by a window of an uptown apartment that looks down upon an international urban landscape “exposed like a giant bleeding wound.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMorby rose to prominence as bassist in Woods, with whom he recorded seven albums on Woodsist Records (Kurt Vile, The Oh Sees, Real Estate) while also forming The Babies with Cassie Ramone of Vivian Girls. Two albums and a clutch of classic singles with the latter followed. Morby’s 2013 debut solo work 'Harlem River' was a homage to New York and featured contributions from artists including Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley (of White Fence), while 2014’s Still Life garnered universal critical praise. “It’s easy to picture Morby with a wineskin under his arm,” noted a Pitchfork review. “His every worldly possession hitched to his back, an eye constantly fixed on some faraway point on the horizon.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRecording at Panoramic Studios, a central Californian home-turned-recording studio, 'City Music' saw Morby joined once again by former The Babies cohorts Megan Duffy (guitar) and Justin Sullivan (drums). Here the vocals were at recorded night, in darkness, overlooking a Pacific Ocean illuminated only by the stars, the wash and whisper of the ebbing tidal a distant soundtrack. Six weeks of European touring had left the trio speaking a secret language that only a band can speak. “The language of a musical family,” explains Morby. “There was an outdoor shower with no curtain and deer ran through the front yard during the meals we cooked for each other...” The record was completed with Richard Swift in Oregon (producer of Foxygen, sometime member of The Black Keys).\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom the widescreen opening of \"Come To Me Now\" through the bubblegum stomp of the Ramones-eulogising ‘1-2-3-4’ (which also references late poet Jim Carroll’s litany of friends lost, ‘People Who Died’), a stripped-back and wistful cover of \"Caught In My Eye\" by nihilistic LA punk wrecking crew Germs and on to Leonard Cohen-evoking closer \"Downtown’s Lights\", 'City Music' reads like a selection of musical postcards composed and posted in the moment. It is a forensic and poetic examination of a modern America in love with the myth of itself.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kevin Morby","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":44536161435811,"sku":"DOC131cd","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP Black Vinyl","offer_id":44536161468579,"sku":"DOC131lp","price":23.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"Secretly Selects LP Vinyl Me, Please Exclusive","offer_id":44536161534115,"sku":"DOC131lp-C1","price":19.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0651\/6703\/2483\/files\/secretly.selects.kevinmorby.citymusic.jpg?v=1776690367"},{"product_id":"kevin-morby-city-music-anniversary-edition","title":"City Music (5th Anniversary)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCity Music 5th Anniversary Edition Limited Edition On Clear Pink Vinyl. Includes digital download code for LP audio. City Music is an airplane descending over frozen lakes into Chicago. City Music is riding the Q Train out to Coney Island to smell the ocean and a morning in Philadelphia where great cranes reconfigure the buildings like an endless puzzle. City Music is a quiet afternoon moment on a bench in Baltimore, a highway in Seattle at night where the distant houses look like tiny flames and a bottle of red wine being drained on a bridge in Paris. City Music is a bus pulling into St. Louis at dawn where the arch looks like a metal rainbow reflecting the days early sunlight....\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFull of listless wanderlust, it’s a collection inspired by and devoted to the metropolitan experience across America and beyond by a songwriter cast from his own mould. 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It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator’s brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image. “Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener,” explains Morby. “Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.” It finds Morby exploring similar themes of solitude, but this time framed by a window of an uptown apartment that looks down upon an international urban landscape “exposed like a giant bleeding wound.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMorby rose to prominence as bassist in Woods, with whom he recorded seven albums on Woodsist Records (Kurt Vile, The Oh Sees, Real Estate) while also forming The Babies with Cassie Ramone of Vivian Girls. Two albums and a clutch of classic singles with the latter followed. Morby’s 2013 debut solo work 'Harlem River' was a homage to New York and featured contributions from artists including Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley (of White Fence), while 2014’s Still Life garnered universal critical praise. “It’s easy to picture Morby with a wineskin under his arm,” noted a Pitchfork review. “His every worldly possession hitched to his back, an eye constantly fixed on some faraway point on the horizon.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRecording at Panoramic Studios, a central Californian home-turned-recording studio, 'City Music' saw Morby joined once again by former The Babies cohorts Megan Duffy (guitar) and Justin Sullivan (drums). Here the vocals were at recorded night, in darkness, overlooking a Pacific Ocean illuminated only by the stars, the wash and whisper of the ebbing tidal a distant soundtrack. 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Laura Lee explains the album’s title: \"My grandpa would always ask me 'Como me quieres?' ('how much do you love me'?), and he'd only ever accept one response. 'Con todo el mundo' (With all the world).\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThroughout ‘Con Todo El Mundo’, Laura Lee’s melodic low-end theory, Mark’s lyrical, free-role guitar lines, and DJ’s ever-steady, ever-ready backbeat form something greater than their parts. 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Think of a space between Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters\/Sun Kil Moon), Gram Parsons and the dreamier side of My Morning Jacket; a heavenly place of pure country soul, touched by an endearing innocence and honesty that can only come from someone still in their early twenties. From Colorado Springs, and now a resident of Nashville where he first moved to study, Yellen's road to Country Sleep has been anything but the straightest and easiest. In 2006, he formed Night Beds and self-released three rudimentary EPs between 2008 and 2011. Taking out a loan, Yellen rented an out-of-town, pre-civil war home in the woods that was previously owned by the late Johnny Cash and June Carter (and still maintained by the couple's friends). Inspired by the serendipity of the discovery, he started working on Country Sleep, both in his country retreat and back in civilisation at Nashville's Brown Owl studio. Country Sleep begins with just a voice, a high and tender lament, for 71 precious seconds; a spirit to be reckoned with. Next up, a full band kicks up some dust behind a deliciously bittersweet melody. After that, more beautiful crooning unfolds over a violin\/guitar backdrop that keeps building until the pace momentarily quickens to the sound of handclaps before a sudden, heart-aching fade. The album concludes with \"TENN\", as in Tennessee, written the next day after the night before, hungover and lost. Yellen admits the songs were often born out of, \"destructive circumstances, and many varied attempts to sedate myself.\" Indeed, anyone listening to Country Sleep - whose title harks back to the 'night bed' in the back of his car - will also find the record a cathartic experience.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Night Beds","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":44536162517155,"sku":"DOC075cd","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":44536162549923,"sku":"DOC075lp","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0651\/6703\/2483\/files\/country-sleep-dead-oceans-doc075.jpg?v=1776690367"},{"product_id":"dialo-john-vanderslice","title":"D.I.A.L.O.","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"D.I.A.L.O.\" is the second 7\" single taken from John Vanderslice's 2009 release, Romanian Names. The song is a highlight from an album with no shortage of highlights, and paired with the exclusive non-album track \"Do What You Want\" makes for an incredible 1-2 punch. The fried out fuzz-pop of  \"Do What You Want\" plays a perfect foil to the spacey sonics of \"D.I.A.L.O.\" Containing two instant classics, one per side, this is the way a great 7\" single should be.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"John Vanderslice","offers":[{"title":"7\"","offer_id":44536163238051,"sku":"DOC036","price":5.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0651\/6703\/2483\/files\/dialo-dead-oceans-doc036.jpg?v=1776690307"},{"product_id":"dagger-beach-john-vanderslice","title":"Dagger Beach","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhile it's true I did endure a terrible break-up at the beginning of writing this record, this is not a break up record. Dagger Beach is a put-me-the-fuck-back-together record. The break up came in late 2011, after endless months of White Wilderness touring. I returned home to an empty house, and, as that's pretty  unbearable when you're not quite right in the head, I decided to set out walking. I hiked the Lost Coast (36 miles of off-the-grid splendor in Southern Humboldt County), I hiked the entire 150-mile trail system of Pt. Reyes, I hiked for days, deep, deep in the woods, usually alone.As I walked and walked, listening to records on repeat, I started obsessing about music again.  As the experience changed me, it changed the record. 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These songs represent both a definite ending and an undeniable new beginning. Hope you enjoy the journey. The Darker Shores EP comes as a welcomed follow-up to last year's LP, Dark Shores. After long spells supporting both The Tallest Man On Earth and Phosphorescent, Strand of Oaks takes his newly informed sound to Europe for a headlining tour, plus London and Nijmegen dates with Damien Jurado and a stop at End of the Road Festival on September 1. 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I like to be forced to do something that’s slightly hard, just to see if we can.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Just to see if we can” could be the unofficial motto of Bright Eyes, the band Oberst founded as a teenager and plays in with two of his oldest friends, multi-instrumentalists Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. “We’ve never made the same record twice,” the singer says. “I’m proud of that.” From warm folk-rock to austere electro, plaintive, earnest ballads to glacially cool guitar noise, Bright Eyes has tried on pretty much every sound that’s ever inspired them, just to see if they could. Along the way they’ve collaborated with many of their influences, heroes, and peers, from Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris to Jenny Lewis, Nick Zinner and Britt Daniel. And they’ve seen their songs covered by many more, including Lorde, The Killers, and Mac Miller.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFor a band that’s often been perceived as an outlier – the ingenious but quixotic group fronted by that wunderkind singer-songwriter with the floppy hair and bedroom eyes - the depth, breadth, and impact of the Bright Eyes canon is remarkable. And that’s what really strikes you when you sit down to fully take in the nine Bright Eyes albums that will be reissued, in chronological order, in groups of three, beginning this spring. Over the last two-plus decades, as Bright Eyes has released one after another time capsule LP’s –urgent dispatches from transcendent, fleeting eras of our collective lives – they’ve also simultaneously been assembling a robust, mature, narratively cohesive discography. “I’ve written a looooot of songs,” Oberst says, laughing. “And by no means are they all good, but the fact that we can cull through these records and find ones that I’m not ashamed to sing years later makes me feel pretty happy.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt’s the desire to celebrate that sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt was the band’s way of reframing, rediscovering, and renewing the past. It was also a hilarious amount of work. “I thought it was a cool concept,” Oberst says. “Then I realized its nine records, six songs a piece, so that’s like 54 different songs you have to record!” He laughs. But if there’s a mantra more central to the Bright Eyes ethos as trying something new just to see if you can get away with it, it’s signing up for way more than you can handle just to see if you can make it work. “We always bite off more than we can chew,” Oberst summarizes. “It keeps things interesting.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eDigital Ash in a Digital Urn (2005)\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“The first three are innocent in a way, because we didn’t have an audience when we were making them,” Oberst says. “But from Lifted on, I was definitely aware of an audience. Lifted was well-received right away, and then everything happened with Wide Awake and Digital Ash.” Those two albums came out simultaneously. And their lead singles – “Take It Easy (Love Nothing),” from the austere, remote Digital Ash, and “Lua,” from the warm, folky Wide Awake - debuted in the top two slots on the Billboard Hot 100. “First Day of My Life,” also from Wide Awake, would later be voted the Number One love song of all time by NPR Music’s reader’s poll.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBright Eyes had officially broken through. It was a heady, exciting time, but also fraught and tense, both because of the band’s careening new fame, and because of the state of the world. When Bright Eyes made their Tonight Show debut in 2006, they chose to perform none of their shiny new hits, instead delivering a searing, harrowing rendition of their caustic anti-Bush anthem, “When The President Talks To God.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThese days, Oberst is still amusing himself by messing with the extremes Bright Eyes baked into this era’s releases, extremes that reflected the polar, with-us-or-against-us, fractious feel of the times. The reworked Digital Ash tracks, originally so clean and elegant, are, on the companion EP, full of “harmonica and mandolins – folky vibes,” Oberst says. 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